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The Vineyard of the Vine

There is a design within you which is intended to be released in your passion to fuel your purpose towards your destiny. That design is real and divinely engineered, so setbacks and failures cannot and do not invalidate your purpose. Setbacks and failures along an eternal path towards destiny are, more often than not, a byproduct of how quickly we attempt to do what we do.

When my children were little, I made them hold my hand when walking through a parking lot. We would talk along the way and I would tell them where we are going. When I told them, however, it wasn’t so they could let go of my hand and run ahead as that would be dangerous. It was to walk in relationship towards a destination because I enjoyed them and wanted relationship to raise them into maturity. I don’t hold their hands in the parking lot like I used to but I don’t want them to run ahead. The enjoyment in the walk towards the destination is in the companionship.

God created each of us for great and glorious things. Those things are unto His glory and for the advancement and fulfillment of His purposes. We are designed to agree with Him in His stuff, which validates our stuff. As such, we aren’t “used” by God, we are “included” by God. We don’t do things “for” God, we do things “with” God.

When we gain vision and purpose, the greatest challenge for many of us is the pace with which we approach that vision. If we decide we are commissioned to be “used” by God to work “for” Him, we likely will run ahead and be about “our” purpose. See the irony? When we embrace purpose so tightly that we think it’s “ours,” we are actually choosing to exclude the One that designed us for that very purpose.

“When you have eaten your fill in this land, 12 be careful not to forget the Lord, who rescued you from slavery in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 6:11-12)

That passage from Deuteronomy warns of what happens when we look around and think we’ve actually done something. If we run ahead to do stuff for God instead of walking with Him, we will almost certainly get to the place of some accomplishment and think we did it. In fact, we may have not necessarily depended on Him at all. Any accomplishment limited to us is less than what He wants to accomplish with us. He’ll tell us where we are going, but it’s not to run ahead. Enjoy the walk with Him.